About

Lucy Loves Travel is to travel what the slow movement is to food. All of my trips are carried out with a balance between activities which create a connection between you and the places you are visiting and time for you to enjoy on your own. Holidays are about escaping from, not mimicking, your every day.

I specialise in organising personalised trips to Italy, Spain, Greece, France and the UK, but can also set up trips in Switzerland, Portugal, Germany, Austria, Turkey, Croatia, Hungary, Denmark, Morocco and India. The emphasis on any trip is upon moments, not just monuments.

How does it all work? 

You can send an email to info@lucylovestravel.com detailing what you’re interested in and I will then arrange a consultation with you. During the free initial consultation, I will advise you as to your best options, dependent upon the kind of person you are and what you like doing. Most importantly I can guide you towards places you might not have perhaps heard of which I know would fit you perfectly. Coming on a trip with LLT means having a trip tailored to you specifically, a trip which fits your personal measurements and no one else’s. An LLT trip cannot be replicated as it is as unique as the person who comes on the trip. There is no such thing as a standard itinerary, after all, there is no such thing as a standard person. 

Visits to places will always involve an element of participation by you, for example tasting your way through a place via its local specialities. To paraphrase Italo Calvino, you need to eat a country, swallowing it whole, in order to get to know it. Or perhaps you would prefer to enjoy a visit to a French chateau’s via its vineyard. Or hiking in the Cyclades and seeing the local goats and sheep before sampling their famous cheese. Or travelling around Rome like the locals, on a Vespa, stopping off for some Roman delicacies at the local food market along the way. My only request from you is that you let me into your dreams, so that I can recreate them for you. 

Please note that in booking a trip with me, you are also contributing to charities which support young people in education. The charity I currently give to is the Malala Fund: https://www.malala.org whose mission is to help the 130 million girls worldwide, who are currently unable to access education.

My background

 

If curiosity killed the cat, I must be on at least my ninth life. My curiosity about people and the world is actually of greater importance than my childhood experiences about living in Milan and visiting grandparents who lived near Paris. Curiosity is the lifeblood of travel. As a child I devoured books, losing myself  in worlds far removed from my own and this wanderlust has remained to this day.

My first and most enduring love is Italy. It is hard not to have ‘O mio caro bambino‘ playing in my head, as it did in ‘A Room with a View’, when I think of my time spent living in Italy; lazy days drinking cappuccino in the Piazza del Campo in Siena, and evenings spent feasting on bowls of pasta with tomatoes which made the English equivalent seem like an entirely different vegetable. My dolce vita life continued in Rome, where I was lucky enough to live in the beautiful Trastevere, Monteverde Nuovo and Testaccio neighbourhoods whilst working as a Lloyd’s broker and events manager. I learned that my Tuscan and Northern Italian would not suffice in a city where abbreviation is the lingua franca. Paris, London, Milan, Rome, Siena are some of the places I have called home, and now I live in Barcelona, a city which similarly captivated me upon my first visit here twelve years ago. It is a vibrant, beautiful and cosmopolitan city to which my groups want to return time and time again.

I graduated from the University of Cambridge with a Master’s in Education and from the University of Manchester with a degree in History and Italian. Spanish, Italian and French have been a passport to living in those countries. I enjoyed passing on my love of languages when I worked as a teacher. As a former teacher of history, I also relish the chance to share this knowledge with groups, with the world as my classroom. Current affairs have always been a passion of mine and I greatly enjoyed teaching English to Italian politicians when I lived in Rome.

Travelling is about smelling the croissants in Paris, feeling the sun on your face in Barcelona, tasting the food in Italy, listening to the Tower of Babel that is Europe, sitting and people watching in the piazzas. A trip with Lucy Loves Travel focuses as much on the food, experiences and people as it does on the buildings. My trips seek to replicate that magical moment when you find a book that you simply can’t put down and never want to end.